Category: Journal

Because I have blog stats and know what you folks are showing up for, here’s a picture of Admiral Coco Marshmallow Flerkin-Wittingstall for your general perusal and admiration. It’s astonishing how much colour she managed to find in our flat, given our general decorating preferences. Astonishing, also, how much of her belly fur is still growing back after she had some surgery prior to coming to live with us.

This week has been all about regrouping after the latest life-roll to disrupt my year (the third, and hopefully, the last). My brain is heavily scattered at the moment, and my anxiety gets to drive a lot more than I’d like, so I wanted to create a space where I could just sit down and get my priorities in order. Part of that meant dragging out all the work spaces on my desk and taking a close look at them. Which, inevitably, means dragging out a veritable mountain of notebooks and taking a look at everything that’s in progress, then looking at the current unfinished projects on the digital front. I had assumed I was in a notebook-lite workflow just prior to doing this. It would appear…not so much. That said, it looks worse than it is, as not every notebook represents an active work project. There are two finished Bullet Journals in there, left in place so I can

One of the most useful guidelines for blogging is sitting down every morning and asking yourself: “what is the most useful thing I can put out into the world right night?” Some days that will be a deep thought. Some days, it will be much simpler. Like this: There are plenty of reasons to be irritated by the Christmas season starting in October, but I’ll admit that the easy availability of panettone for three months of the year almost makes up for it. My partner sold me on these a few years back, when she described it as “delicious Italian bread cake,” and it lived up to the hype. Remarkably soft to bite down on, and lighter than most cakes I’ve picked up in my life, but also filled with fruity awesomeness. Interestingly, there’s an attempt underway to try and designate authentic Panettone as a product of a specific region, much like certain wines, but it hasn’t yet reached fruition.

Today I return to the internet the same way I left it a week ago: by posting a picture of my cat doing cat-like things. There’s a lot of gathering-up-the-threads going on today, trying to figure out where I’m at in a whole bunch of projects. First cab off the rank is calling the shelter we adopted the Admiral from last month, letting them know that our thirty-day trail is going well and that our cat is very definitely going to be our cat. We like her and want to keep her. Second cab off the rank is taking a look at my daily routine and hacking it a little, trying to figure out where the kitty fits in. The admiral is an inside cat, and our apartment is kinda small. That means she needs a lot of exercise of the hunting-and-pouncing kind, or the thing that she hunts and pounces will inevitably be our feet. This means there needs

Offline today, on account of heading to my Grandmother’s funeral, so I’m posting this picture of the Admiral engaged in one of her weirder sleeping habits. You don’t get to hear the tiny snores that kick in when she falls asleep with her head like this, but trust me, they’re adorable.

I’m largely offline today, so here’s a glimpse at the planning document for a future Brain Jar series. This is poking at a story idea that sits about halfway through an 8-book run. My grandmother passed away yesterday morning, and today I’m running on too little sleep and a fresh hit of grief in a year that’s already been heavy on grieving. I’m going to be paring back expectations on the writing front for a stretch, trying to winnow down process to the bare minimum of things that need doing right now.

I snapped this photograph while waiting at the door before Write Club yesterday. The snoot is donate by Lulu, a regular feature on the inimitable Angela Slatter’s Instagram. Today I’m off to the sunshine coast, where my grandmother is in hospital. She’s in her nineties and hasn’t been in great shape the last few times we caught up. She went into palliative care for a bit, but rallied later in the day and moved back into regular care. Regular blogging will resume at some point, but it’s fairly clear at this point that 2019 is not a year where regular anything is possible. On the plus side, it’s also a year that’s taught me the value of appreciating dog snoots, toe beans, good friends, and the rare moments when everything has been running smoothly and you’re free to put your focus on a single project.

Over the last few weeks my laptop has taken on an increasingly stationary role. I’ve pulled it away from the current set-up exactly twice–once for Write Club and an afternoon at the university, and once when it was necessary to write away from the desk due to other things going on in the flat. the rest of the time it’s sat in the same spot, with the same peripherals plugged in or attached to the bluetooth. Surrounded by the same tools, the same books, the same project notes. After two or three years of migrating around the flat two or three times every work day, the steady routine of being able to just sit and write is surprising. Of course, give that it’s Wednesday as this post goes live, I’m probably engaging in my once-weekly ritual of carting the computer across town to get work done. On the downside, I’ve been in a stretch of letting my phones get smarter

My inbox sits at 25 emails this morning, which is better than it was yesterday but still enough to make me twitchy. It’s a little reminder that my routines are off, and that we’ve been working at the edge of burnout here in Casa Del Brain Jar. It’s also a reminder that I won’t bounce back automatically, just ’cause I want too. Getting back to writing will take effort, as will clearing email and getting back on top of all my other projects. One of the downsides of working from home–particularly a small flat like ours–is the potential for the space you work and the space where you deal with the big things life throws your way bleeding into one another. The little distractions you embrace to cope with loss or distract yourself during periods of high stress linger around after the cause of those behaviours is gone. The housework you let slide because you didn’t have the bandwidth is

I didn’t really have pets as a kid. Not the kind who were around long enough that you remember them. My dad kept snakes for a time, and those terrified me. We had guinea pigs when I was three, and a budgie for a short while, but the phase where pets and my life intersected was largely done by the time I turned seven. When my partner and I started living together, she brought her guinea pigs with her. They occupied a corner of the flat and interacted with one another, interrupted quiet writing days at home with demands for food and attention. They were a constant source of distraction and joy. I told myself I wasn’t a pet person, but they suckered me in anyway. There were noses to boop and personalities to learn and a surprising amount of affection for a critter that only weighs a kilogram. We lost Pepe, one of the pigs, last Friday. He’d gone

A new dress shop has opened down by our local pizza place, and yesterday I noticed a giant ball of carefully manicured fur hanging out by the entrance while stopping in to pick up dinner. I found myself wondering why a dress shop needs a dog, and the answers I came up with will probably be the seed of a new story down the line. The photo really doesn’t do justice to the epic, real-life fuzziness, but it’s hard to get a good shot when you’re hungry and the pepperoni is calling you. We’re in week five or six of caring for sick pets here at Camp Brain Jar, transferring our attention from the first sick guinea pig to the second, who is having things much worse than his younger brother. The stress is starting to take its toll–I spent a good chunk of my day having the self-care-isn’t-easy-and-it-isn’t-just-indulgence talk with myself, trying to shake off the increasingly-negative headspace that’s

I’m putting the finishing touches on a new Short Fiction Lab release this week, going through the story draft and making last minute tweaks and squinting at the title from different directions to make sure it’s right. The cover for this one is already done, so it will be a pretty quick production process one I’m satisfied with the story text and the author’s note. The new story is actually a very old one, in some respects. It’s a ghost story, of a sort, involving lonely roads and two people who may not be in love anymore, and what happens when a road trip goes all kinds of wrong. I wrote a very early draft of it back in 2007, but it never seemed to fit together right. Over the years I’ve pulled it out and tinkered with it dozens of times, taking it in different directions. This version…well, it started by going back to the very first draft I